The SHOWE-IT project, an experience sharing on ICTs services in social residential buildings

Panel: 8. Monitoring and evaluation: building confidence and enhancing practices

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Jonathan Villot, Mines Saint-Etienne, France
Kathleen Zoonekindt, European Commission project “DREEAM”

Abstract

According to European Commission (EC), houses and buildings considering their whole life cycle are responsible for 40% of total EU energy consumption. Buildings are also the largest source of greenhouse gases emissions, accounting for 36% of overall European CO2 emission. Taking into account that 85% of the total energy consumption within a building life cycle is related to building operation phase, savings related to usage of buildings seem to have the highest potential impact for a consumption reduction. According to Buildings Performance Institute Europe, in 2009 European households were responsible for 68% of the total final energy used in buildings where as much as 70% of the energy is used for space heating. Considering global sustainability challenges and in link with the 2020 targets (20% energy demand reduction, 20% CO2 reduction and 20% of energy from renewable sources), ICT enabler technologies are expected to become a key solution for the reduction of energy consumption in residential housing in the upcoming years.

ICT based solution developed and tested in the SHOWE-IT project provide the home automation and consumption monitoring for in the residential housing sector with the goal of achieving 15% - 20% reduction in gas and energy consumption. The SHOWE-IT project provided an excellent opportunity to try in a real life environment a system, which was meant to become an optimal combination of technologies to address the energy reduction challenges in the residential buildings.

Over the lifetime of the project it became clear that a combination of off-the-shelf technologies does not always perform as expected. The project results in many lessons learned which are to be considered in the future development and application of ICT based technologies for the residential housing sector. This paper presents and shares the learning and the experiences obtained during the SHOWE-IT project.